TileMill – An open source map design studio
tilemill-project.github.io
tilemill-project.github.io
> TileMill has shifted to an open open source contributor model and moved to its own organization, tilemill-project.
A shift which has come a year or so after the project was abandoned by Mapbox in favor of Mapbox Studio (the official, supported successor to TileMill).
TileMill alone is still useful for creating one's own raster tile set, as long as the application remains in working order.
However, last I checked it gave me tremendous issues running on Linux as many dependencies had become outdated.
Although, I haven't checked back in a while since I moved to Mapbox Studio.
MapBox hired the maintainer of maputnik though, so the future is unclear.
(Not disagreeing with your point.)
> Mapnik raster map rendering engine
An engine that renders maps as raster images, called Mapnik. Should be clear from the quote.
> CartoCSS styling language
A CSS like language to style maps (change the looks of) instead of HTML. If you know CSS, that should follow from the description.
> It was originally developed by Mapbox, but they've since moved to vector rendering.
Should be pretty obvious from context that Mapbox is the name of the company that originally developed the software.
ELI5: It is for drawing pictures of maps.
Does this help me create an overlay layer for Google Maps? Does this help me embed a map widget on my own website? Does this help me remix open-source mapping data to produce a customized rendering? Does this help me create maps for my fantasy RPG campaign setting?
Yes, I can do some googling and research these terms and figure it out, that's not the point. The point is that this website does not do a good job of telling a random person (or random developer) why they might be interested in this tool and what it can do for them if they are not already familiar with web map viewer technology..
I was a lot of fun to work with, CartoCSS allowed me to be immediately productive with it. In the end though it was too expensive to serve tiles from AWS.
It is no longer the case, modern computers and browsers have acceptable performance when using vectorial maps even for very complex maps. The need for firing your own tile server is very unusual.
Also, map data is getting progressively richer and more expensive to render, particularly when adding 3D data, so I'm not convinced that offloading everything to the client is still a 90% use case.
The most glaring difference is that label placement in common vector renderers is generally "try once, fail if no room", whereas in Mapnik (standard raster renderer), for example, you can supply a list of positions to try in order of preference.
There's a lot to like about client-side rendering (which is why I wrote https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker/ to generate vector tiles) but it's not up to feature parity with raster rendering yet, and for some of us those features are important.
In fact most of the time I can get way with just a vector layer over a 3rd party tile layer using Leaflet and some fancy fireworks showing labels on click/hover events.
I'm really glad I don't need to render tiles in the server side anymore but I remember the time when I had not choice but manage my own tile server simply because many clients could not handle something simple like a choropleth map with all the voting districts in my state.